Tom Galvin

Milton Hershey and an Organization’s Commitment to its Members

As a contrast to the gig economy discussions of recent episodes, Tom offers an example of an organization and its leader who exercised high organizational commitment to its members. This is the story of Milton Hershey, the founder of both the Hershey Chocolate Factory and the small town that grew from it, then located in a rather remote spot east of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.Read More

41: Images of Organization – Gareth Morgan

We tackle Gareth Morgan’s classic book Images of Organization, originally published in 1986. This lengthy and detailed volume synthesizes an incredible range of organization theories and concepts over the previous century and presents them under the umbrella of eight distinct metaphors. Each metaphor represents a different way of understanding the existence and  dynamics of organizations, their members, and their interactions with the environment.Read More

The Value of Simple Exploratory Models for Explaining Complex Behaviors

Modeling was an uncommon method of conducting research in organization studies back during the classic period. The inclusion of a model (complete with FORTRAN source code) in Cohen et al.'s garbage can model article was therefore very exciting. Could Tom replicate the results in a modern programming language?Read More

39: Carnegie Mellon Series #4 – Organizational Choice

The podcasters discuss a fascinating article, “A Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice,” published in Administrative Science Quarterly back in 1972 by Michael Cohen, James March, and Johan Olsen. This is another episode from the Carnegie-Mellon University tradition, alongside Episode 4 on Organizational Routines and Episode 19 on Organizational Learning. This installment addresses organizational decision making and choice and, like the others in this series, it changed the way people think about organizations and organizational behavior.Read More

38: Socialization and Occupational Communities – Van Maanen

In this episode, we examine John Van Maanen's classic ethnographic study of police recruits from an urban police department in the U.S. "Police socialization: A longitudinal examination of job attitudes in an urban police department," published in Administrative Science Quarterly in 1975, presents Van Maanen's study on the socialization process of new police officers from their training and indoctrination at the police academy to their early months on the beat. Read More

37: Socrates on Management – Oeconomicus by Xenophon

This episode takes us to ancient Greece and one of the great practical philosophers, Xenophon (pronounced ZEN-uh-phun), whose Oeconomicus may have been one of his "minor" works in the world of philosophy, but it is a fascinating work for those interested in management and organizational studies. The book is written as a dialogue, with Socrates playing a sort of narrator who engages with men and encourages them to become more virtuous, with varying success.Read More

36: The Human Capital Hoax – Employment in the Gig Economy

We step back from the classics and examine a contemporary work covering a timely topic – the negative effects of ‘Uberization’ and the gig economy on the economic and social fabric. The article is Peter Fleming's "The human capital hoax: Work, debt, and insecurity in the era of uberization," published in 2017 in the journal Organization Studies. In it, Fleming takes a classic approach towards economics and traces its ‘dark’ influence on contemporary dynamics.Read More

35: The Managed Heart – Arlie Hochschild

The Managed Heart, originally published in 1983 by Dr. Arlie Hochschild, introduced the concept of emotional labour as a counterpart to the physical and mental labour performed in the scope of one’s duties. The importance of emotional labour is made clear in Dr. Hochschild’s descrption of flight attendants, who regardless of the dispositions of airline passengers, turbulence in the flight, or personal stress is required to act and behave in ways that minimize passenger anxiety and encourage them to fly with that airline again. Thus, the book explores the challenges of stress, protecting one’s personal identity and private life, differentiated (and often unfair) gender roles, miscommunication between supervisors and workers or workers and clients, and others.Read More

34: Sociotechnical Systems – Trist and Bamforth

We discuss important article by Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth, “Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Longwall Method of Coal-Getting,” published in the journal Human Relations in 1951. Eric Trist was a British social scientist best known for his contributions to the field of organization development and one of the founders of the Tavistock Institute. Ken Bamforth was a miner and industrial fellow of the Tavistock Institute. The article’s subtitle is an examination of the psychological situation and defences of a work group in relation to the social structure and technological content of the work system, and explores how a technological change in the coal-mining industry tore apart the social structure of the workers who were supposed to have benefitted from the change. The technological change in question was the mechanization of the process of mining and extracting coal along a very long face, as opposed to the previous ‘hand-got’ methods where small teams would dig out coal from smaller faces.Read More

Reflections on Wieliczka

Tom reflects on an experience that arose during his preparations for Episode 34 (Trist & Bamforth, 1951). In this post, he reminisces on a bus tour taken in the summer of 2001 from Heidelberg, Germany to the Wieliczka Salt Mines located only a short drive from Krakow. These mines are famous for the salt sculptures and engravings that the miners carved out of the walls as a means of overcoming the harsh and isolated environment.Read More